Lately Keava and Slvr and I have been teaming up to run epic elites in the newer content. We’re usually joined by one or two of Keava’s guildies/friends, and sometimes PuG any remaining spots.

Having cruised pretty easily through the Eveningstar and Sschindylryn chains, last night we set our sights on Demonweb after a quick cruise through the Druid’s Deep chain for commendations. Two of Keava’s friends joined us, along with a great ranger who’d run the Sschindy chain with us a few nights back.

We figured we’d do the quests in whatever order we found them, given the randomness of the web paths. I was pretty happy when we found Deal and the Demon (“Ah,” Ymris says. “You have come to honor our bargain. Good.” – yes, I DO always have to throw that in there. LOL) and Trial by Fury first, since I’m not overly fond of either of those – particularly Trial by Fury, because I always get lost and usually end up falling back to the start several times.

But we handled those quite nicely, maybe a few tense moments here and there, nothing we couldn’t get past, though. Keava’s healer friend had to drop, but we whined loud enough in the Adepts channel to snag First’s attention. We only had Reclaiming the Rift left to go, which made me happy – hey, Acanthia solos that easily on EH. How bad could EE be?

Well, you know what they say about “Ask a stupid question.” And you probably know that the answer is, “Very bad. Very bad indeed.” To say that the end fight was brutal would be doing a grave disservice to the word “brutal.”

Weird thing, though – well, probably weird to anyone who wasn’t part of the group. We were laughing our arses off the whole time. First warned us that he “might be drinking a lot of alcohol” on the way there. I don’t know if he really was or not; you couldn’t tell from his healing, which was excellent (then again, if you’ve run with First, you probably know that he’s a better healer drunk than most so-called “elite” healers are sober). How he managed to keep us all going with only one shrine in the whole quest is beyond me.

Nobody gave up. It could’ve easily been a wipe – I think there was at least one point when all of us were dead (good thing the ONE shrine in the game is right there) – but we laughed and hung in there even though by the end we were mostly playing naked because all our gear was broken.

For once I was glad to be a packrat, because everything Acanthia was originally wearing was completely broken except her helm and gloves, and they were down to a sliver of blue. I kept getting messages that my backpack was overflowing from all the broken gear now taking up inventory space, but thanks to my hoarding tendencies I had other stuff to swap in. The downside was that I didn’t have enough inventory space to take off her outfit at the end so she could be nekkid in our celebratory “YAY, we did it!” screenshot.

I did manage to clear one inventory space, though… and for the best possible reason. I’d been hoping to pull an Embrace of the Spider Queen for Jall; I think that’ll be better for her than her Leaves of the Forest, and although she has the cleric commendations set armor, I’m really not overly impressed with it. I was disappointed to open the chest and not find an Embrace, but First DID pull one and no one else wanted it. I was quite happy to send him 25 major pots from Jall’s stash, and that Embrace totally made up for Acanthia’s 11K+ repair bill.

That’s the kind of night I love. Great friends, great fun, even some great loot for the icing on the cake – hard to improve on that!